The Gbanabom Collective

"Gbanabom Hallowell is a poet

worth waiting for in future!"

--Syl Cheney-Coker, author of The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar and The Blood in the Desert's Eyes

“Gbanabom Hallowell's poems are evocative incantations at their best, moving with an hypnotic rhythm that, as Robert Hass says, is itself a political act in that all rhythm moves us. The lines keep shifting, in his characteristic way, between the large and the small, making each define the other. He explores subjects…that range from overtly political to the personal, oftentimes counterpointing one against another to create an emotionally powerful statement. A number of the poems deal with his mother, but also mother earth in a mythic way: indeed, Hallowell might well be described as a poet of powerful national myths, often using them to get at political and personal issues. In brief these are sophisticated poems of considerable accomplishment. I think he is a poet we will hear a lot from in the future.”

---Richard Jackson, award winning poet and author of Unauthorized Autobiography: New and Selected Poems

“When he is writing at his best, Gbanabom Hallowell combines the nomenclature of classic surrealism with a vivid and evocative portrait of his native culture; he also writes poignantly about the consequences of political upheaval and exile"

--David Wojahn, award winning poet and author of Strange Good Fortune

"The spirit of search pervades the whole collection with recurring images of the poet looking through windows into vast expanses of landscape and seascape, into the Lion Mountains of his country, into its trees, listening to the sound of its rivers, its birds and its people. [Gbanabom Hallowell] peers into the dark liquid of the calabash to discover clues to the way forward, but the calabash often gets broken and like the other recurring image of the mirror which looks inwards into the poet and outwards into the world, its broken fragments have to be painfully pieced together in an effort to present the whole picture of his vision.

He is always conscious of his responsibility as a poet to his country. He seeks to write “…the centrifugal poem that would outlive/the rogue politicians of my country.” The process is not without pain. Asked to write a poem for his country, his response is forty-two repetitions of the phrase “secretpains”. Fortunately, the poet is able to work his intense feelings with greater articulateness in the rest of the collection! Even in his young life, however, he sees comrades, fellow artists or young soldiers caught up in the war, fall in their prime. He himself often feels the despair of being the “Poet Unwanted”.

"The author tosses the reader back and forth to the diamond fields of Kono, the streets of Liberia and Tripoli, to the geopolitical adventurism of Libya and its consequences in third world countries. In the jungles of kailahun, the author takes a psychiatric plunge into the psyche of a mentally deranged rebel leader, Corporal Boday Candoh. His greed, hallucination and delusion give the reader an insight into the mind of sick movements, as he himself puts it: "You know it all has to do with my visions. Only they are sometimes not clear to me—it is like there is something inside me doing the things I do---I don't have the power and desire to ignore it.

On the edge of the apocalyptic threat the author takes a leap into the second novella titled: "No Place called Freetown.” The leap has both a literary and an allegorical meaning. Above all it has a space and time dimension. On a literary plain the author deals with the theme of war casualties outside the theatre of war. The reader is reminded of John Pepper Clark’s poem, “The Casualty” written after the secessionist Biafra war in which he said the casualty are not only those who are dead or buried, the casualty are many outside the scenes of ravage and wreck.

Our generation mow has something to offer in the person of the author, Gbanabom Hallowell. On the whole, The Lust of Cain is more than just two novellas, it is a vindication of a generation."

Oumar Farouk Sesay's review of The Lust of Cain in For Di People Newspaper 

"If Sierra Leone is microcosmic of the African continent, then Hallowell's poetic engagement is an unambiguous testament to the spectacular spectre of death that interminably haunts the continent under seige and savage sway of murderers and vampires who lust insatiably for blood.

In Drumbeats of War, Gbanabom Hallowell enlists his virile and viscera voice in the strident denunciation of a feckless and decadent national bourgeoisie that has wasted his nation’s patrimony through an avoidable sanguinary harvest of blood. Through the deft deployment of images, dexterous manipulation of tropes, accomplished mobilization of martial metaphors, and the creative husbandry of language with its sign systems, he moulds a poetic universe that is simultaneously down-to-earth, powerful and compelling. The entire collection peaks significantly at two levels: thematic appositeness and stylistic ebullience. This is a voice whose haunting richness and tremulous lyricism in the circumnavigation of a history of violence and violence of history cannot be ignored."

--James Tar Tsaaior, PhD, Lagos State University, Oyo, Nigeria

"Drumbeats of War is a powerful collection of poems. The effortless merger of public and private spaces, feelings, thoughts and lives, and the visceral evocation of “lived” lives and “living” selves is refreshing. [The poet] branches an aesthetic consciousness that is innovative in both the syncretistic blend of traditional, personalized and allusive poetic imagery and a strong individual poetic vision couched in “social eyes”.

Patrick K. Muana, PhD, Department of English, Texas A & M University

"Gbanabom Hallowell's Drumbeats of War is a serious reflection on the nature of human behaviour and historical circumstance, and how both relate to the pathetic human condition. Although Sierra Leone features prominently in this collection, through allusions and other strategies, the poems touch everyone in every corner. The pages of this collection are splashed with potent imagery; alliteration impregnates assonance, giving birth to syllables of dreams and memories. Sexual imagery abounds in the book; and it is a fitting imagery as it embodies a vision of the birth of a new human condition" devoid of sterility and aridity. In other words, the oasis must replace the desert, "public-ease" the "secretpain," so that Sierra Leone, and for that matter, the world, may not be "overrun by carbon dioxide."

I find Gbanabom's choice of symbols particularly striking. Some of the symbols he uses are, The Calabash, The Sea/River, The Drums, The Desert, The Oasis, The Omolankay, and The Human Body. The calabash, in African cultures is a space for the cementing of many social and spiritual bonds. For example, it holds the dowry during traditional weddings; it holds the rice flour and kola during religious rituals. When it breaks, the mores, values, etc. that hold society together are spilled, and what the poet calls "fratricidal relationships" are born. The broken calabash is therefore an apt symbol in a collection that talks about broken bonds and a broken national Mind. The Omolankay is also apt for it conveys the idea of the weight of rogue pot-bellied politicians ferried across pot holes by the cheap labour of poor and exploited citizens. The poet's Omolankay is broken, pointing to the collapse of even the most rudimentary of our "scientific inventions."

Oh no, it is not all sombre, or cerebral poetry. There are hilarious poems. One of such poems is, "In the Labyrinth of Hell." Here, the past leaders and the present, each present an argument as to why he should not be punished by Sia Leona. Quite an interesting read!!